Yet another Hacker News

I'm Rewriting IBM SPSS Statistics in 100% Safe Rust, Alone

17 points kobaltGIT 2 hours ago 17 comments

uniqueuid 55 minutes ago | parent

Sorry but the problem is not primarily software, it’s community, teaching and standardization.

We have R/tidyverse which does 90% of everything and has an amazing community and procedures eg. around documentation. For everything else you have excel or python. So I don’t see the use case.

hodgehog11 35 minutes ago | parent

There are tons of people in the social sciences that still, unfortunately, use SPSS to this day. If you think that R/tidyverse/Excel is a true alternative to SPSS, you definitely haven't interacted with any of these people.

uniqueuid 18 minutes ago | parent

I have, in fact, professionally interacted with, published with and taught these people for almost 20 years ;)

hodgehog11 5 minutes ago | parent

Ah, are you a statistical consultant? That would explain a lot, but you should then know why these people need you. Or maybe you're in a department where the statistical standards are much higher than in mine.

kachnuv_ocasek 51 minutes ago | parent

But why?

tallesborges92 41 minutes ago | parent

Probably he has some tokens available to use

throwaway63467 48 minutes ago | parent

Does safety matter for this kind of software? It’s mostly internal tooling used by researchers and statisticians. I get it rust is cool but safety isn’t the prime concern here I think.

hodgehog11 42 minutes ago | parent

Rust is the prime language for vibecoding because the compiler checks most of the issues for you. This is meant to be part of the ArtCraft suite, so it is intended to be developed and managed with AI agents.

throwaway63467 35 minutes ago | parent

People always seems to confuse correctness as in „it compiles“ vs. „it does what I intended it to do“, not sure how Rust helps with that as it won’t solve mismatch between intent and implementation. Or how could it? Main problem with vibe coding is that you almost always under specify requirements so the agent will fill in the blanks and make choices for you, the language it implements these choices in doesn’t matter much in my opinion, agents will produce correct code from a detailed specification almost always which is why they are so good at translating between languages, they are terrible at interpreting requirements not specified or derivable for complex software though. Rust can’t solve that.

hodgehog11 32 minutes ago | parent

Segmentation faults are super easy to get from AI agents writing C. If you want an agent vibecoding in a compiled language, you have to use Rust. That doesn't mean that the software does what is intended (that requires a review agent and then an orchestrator at minimum) but it makes things a lot easier.

cb321 5 minutes ago | parent

[delayed]

EdwardDiego 41 minutes ago | parent

I'm (well, my LLM is) Rewriting IBM SPSS Statistics in 100% Safe Rust, Alone (for a given value of alone).

You even let your LLM write the README.

Look, we nearly all use LLMs these days, but the phrasing of "I am... ...alone" is particularly weird when it's obviously not just you, it's you with LLMs.

Maybe title it as "A rewrite of IBM SPSS Statistics in Rust with no unsafe" - the 100% safe claim is something an LLM makes, it's not something a reasonable human would say, as it implies the Rust is totally safe, whereas you're trying to communicate that your Rust code uses no unsafe blocks, and these are two different things.

nialse 31 minutes ago | parent

Why not let go of SPSS instead? It has run its course and is basically legacy legacy software by now. But it good fun I suppose? Are you using SPSS as an oracle? (Guessing that the author is/will be in the comments.)

An oracle and fuzzing have been excellent when reimplementing software. Given implausible inputs, the black box shows its colours quickly. Rounding errors and different representations of floats are and endless source of debugging, eh, joy.

Traster 30 minutes ago | parent

This is one of the things that makes me negative on AI. Before AI, no one would have done this. Because it's a huge amount of effort and a total waste of time. Now we have AI, we have this explosion in people going off and doing all these pointless activities.

What do we gain from a plethora of SPSS-alike tools? Nothing. There's literally no explanation on this page about why anyone who uses SPSS would want to use this. But it's "100% Safe Rust". Yes, that's a feature that someone who likes rust wants, not what someone who uses SPSS wants.

What do we lose by fracturing all academic statistical analysis into a dozen different tools instead of 1? Lots!

It's not even clear the person creating this even intends for anyone to use it. So (a) why are they doing it and (b) how do you even know if it actually works if absolutely no one is using it. In fact the danger now is someone who doesn't know the author is just an AI slop dilletante comes along looking for an SPSS-like tool and makes the mistake of trying to use it.

Is there really any difference between this and the people posting AI slop onto their reddit accounts. It's just raising the noise floor to the point where we're going to have to essentially shut down the public internet, everything of value will move to closed spaces.

hodgehog11 7 minutes ago | parent

Sorry, but this really comes across as demonstrating a substantial degree of entitlement. What is the purpose? Easy. A student is trained to use SPSS for their thesis work. They may be given a sitewise license from their university, but only for one device. Then after their training, they lose access to SPSS, but want to do that analysis in their workplace.

Proprietary software, especially at these prices, cause all kinds of issues. SPSS is one of the software packages that has a sizeable audience of people crying out for a true open source alternative. Just because you have the money to afford these things, does not mean that others do.

Also, if you are referring to the similarly named ArtCraft suite as a "pointless activity" then you are really out of touch.

scrubs 14 minutes ago | parent

The title "I'm...100% Safe Rust, Alone" is obnoxious.

Op, is there any technical merit to this, or is this a step in some process to earn brownie points in some pathetic "I'm a morally superior hero club?"

What'd you expect the rest of us to feel? Chastened?